Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a signal modulation technique in which a transmitter divides a signal, and then transmits the divided signal over several subcarriers. The subcarriers are located on a frequency axis of a base band frequency at regular intervals. In OFDM communications, in contrast with conventional serial communication techniques, the signal to be transmitted is divided into N streams, and the N stream are then transmitted in parallel, each on a separate carrier frequency. OFDM techniques transmit the signal reliably and efficiently at a high data rate.
The subcarriers are made “orthogonal” by appropriately selecting the spacing of the frequencies in the base frequency band. Therefore, spectral overlapping among subcarriers is allowed because the orthogonality ensures that the receiver can separate the OFDM subcarriers. With OFDM, a better spectral efficiency is achieved than by using simple frequency division multiplex. OFDM is more robust to data loss due to multipath fading when compared with a single carrier because OFDM increases the symbol period for the same aggregate data rate.
In addition, inter-symbol interference (ISI) in OFDM transmissions can be prevented by inserting a guard interval before each transmitted block. Moreover, OFDM is robust to frequency selective fading. Thus, OFDM is used by many standards, including digital audio and video broadcasting (DAB, DVB), and high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) modems over a twisted pair of wires. OFDM can also be used in wireless local area networks (WLANS), and fixed broadband wireless communication networks.
However, with OFDM, timing and frequency synchronization is difficult. It is a problem to exactly synchronize symbols between the transmitter and the receiver. Timing synchronization requires that the beginning of each OFDM symbol is determined within each frame. Unless the correct timing is known, the receiver cannot remove cyclic prefixes at the correct timing instance, and correctly separate individual symbols before fast Fourier transforms (FFT) are performed to demodulate the signal.
In the prior art, a number of solutions are known for timing synchronization. One technique achieves synchronization by using a number of pilot symbols in specific subcarriers. However, the performance of that synchronization depends on the number of pilot subcarriers, thus the throughput is reduced, see, W. Warner and C. Leung, “OFDM/FM Frame Synchronization for Mobile Radio Data Communication,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 42, pp. 302–313, August 1993.
Another technique uses a joint method for finding the correct symbol timing and correcting the carrier frequency offset by using a correlation with a cyclic prefix. However, the guard interval may easily be corrupted by ISI due to multipath in a mobile channel. That technique also requires a long time to synchronize because it averages the correlated outputs of many OFDM symbols until satisfactory synchronization is achieved, see J. van de Beek, M. Sandell, P. O. Börjesson, “ML estimation of time and frequency offset in OFDM systems,” IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, vol. 45, pp. 1800–1805, July 1997.
In yet another technique, two OFDM training symbols are used for timing and frequency synchronization. There, each training symbol includes two parts in the time domain, i.e., the two parts of each training symbol are made identical in time order by transmitting a pseudo-noise (PN) sequence on even frequencies, while zeros are used on odd frequencies. However, that method is not suitable for OFDM-based WLAN standards such as IEEE 802.11, because that standard defines a different training sequence, see T. M. Schmidl and D. C. Cox, “Robust frequency and timing synchronization for OFDM,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 45, pp. 1613–1621, December 1997.
Therefore, there is a need for synchronizing an OFDM signal in a wireless local area network in a manner that is compatible with existing standards.